Ralph A. Tripp, a professor of infectious diseases, will lead a team in pursuit of innovative global health and development research on norovirus, a highly infectious causing up to 200,000 deaths a year in children under 5 years of age in developing countries.

Tripp and his research team are receiving $100,000 to engineer mammalian cell lines that support norovirus and related enteric virus replication by silencing non-essential virus resistance genes in vaccine cell lines.

While researchers have made advances in studying the virus and identifying some control measures, no efficient cell line exists currently to support studies for vaccine and therapeutic development.

“Norovirus is a common cause of acute gastroenteritis in humans, with greater than 22 million cases occurring in the United States annually,” Tripp said. “There are numerous challenges in culturing human noroviruses, a feature that has hindered vaccine and therapeutic development.”

“Our research team has received several Gates Foundation grants to develop enhanced vaccine cell lines to facilitate the eradication of polio virus and to control other vaccine-preventable diseases-including measles virus and rotavirus,” he said. “We have successfully developed these enhanced vaccine cell lines using RNA interference platform-enabling technology and are confident we can apply this to meet the needs for norovirus.”

The project team is comprised of faculty from UGA and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Victoria, Australia. The project’s co-investigator is Carl Kirkwood, an associate professor at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Kirkwood leads the Enteric Virus Research Group, which is internationally recognized for its contributions to the understanding of enteric diseases, including norovirus and rotavirus.

Grand Challenges Explorations funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Tripp’s project on “Engineering Mammalian Cell Lines to Support Human Norovirus and Related Enteric Viruses” is one of more than 60 Grand Challenges Explorations grants announced Nov. 4 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.